Posts by linger
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Danielle,
not exactly how cultural theory works
At the risk of oversimplifying, does that mean cultural theory actually works in practice by means of analysts basically going, “Look how much meaning I can wring out of this!”?
If so, then, as your earlier comment makes clear, the text needs to be located in a cultural context that appropriately allows that meaning to be extracted – which was blatantly not the case here.
(Without such a licensing context, it’s difficult to read that Marxist analysis above as extracting anything other than the Michael, or perhaps the micturate; if the author was serious, it’s a serious FAIL.) -
Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Yep ... and impractical, since the reliability of the "learning style" assignment is itself very much in doubt.
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Each year, I present my Applied Linguistics class with the Jung-Myer-Briggs test, and the “language learning styles” predicted for each of the 16 personality types. (One module of the course is factors influencing language learning success, including a range of – proposed, but with few exceptions not conclusively supported – psychological factor effects.)
So far, I have observed that:
(1) Most students score close to the midpoint on most scales. Which is to be expected: all four scales are normal distributions, rather than binary categories. This implies that most classifications using the test are arbitrary on at least one dimension. Basically, for any dimension(s) where you score 25% or less (= 2 questions away from the midpoint), you should also consider the neighbouring type description(s).
(2) If I simply present each student with the learning style description corresponding to their personality type as scored, students tend to think their assigned learning style description accurately matches their own learning experience.
But…
(3) If I give each student three unlabelled learning style descriptions (one matching their type score, one for a type differing on 2 dimensions, and one for the complementary type, differing on all 4 dimensions) then their choices of the “best” learning style description are not significantly above chance. Which suggests that the learner descriptions (and possibly also at least some parts of the JMB test), may have little more use than a horoscope.That being said: the extrovert/introvert scale does at least have a clear genetic basis, and does seem to correlate to some extent with preferred learning styles.
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Southerly: A Blog on Behalf of an…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
mothers with young children [...] may not be there but their influence surely is
Only if you think that concern trolling = representation.
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Southerly: Continuing After A Short Interruption, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I know you're joking, but of course Google will not conduct the search you want. For example, it misses the Wikipedia page that reveals that the "drunk smiley" %) already does exist.
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Speaker: Naked Inside the Off-Ramp, in reply to Hebe,
the term “the belt-way”:
most often found encircling complete & utter pants? -
However, the actual story of King Canute may not be the best reference point for Key's behaviour. Far from actually claiming omnipotence, Canute was demonstrating to his supporters that he wasn’t all-powerful.
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Hard News: The GCSB Bill: We at least…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Key is [...] a whole new bad taste
Smarmite? which would explain his propensity to smear...
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@FletcherB:
Which incidentally brings me to one of my pet peeves: New Zealand birth certificates have an expiry date, and have to be “renewed”. That can’t be anything other than pure revenue gathering. I don’t plan on getting unborn, or even reborn, any time soon. -
Up Front: Good Counsel, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Yep; the nocebo effect is described in the second of the two Goldacre links above, and a 5-minute version is in this Nerdstock speech.